System Builder Marathon, March 2010: $3,000 Extreme PC

Benchmark Results: Productivity

3ds Max renders a single 1080p animation frame in 21 seconds, which seems a little slow since we’ve been doing the same test in less than 30 seconds for two years.

Antivirus programs have a great excuse for not speeding up in spite of faster hardware--the newer versions have expanded definitions that require a greater number of clock cycles to complete. With that in mind, we can only look forward to our three-way comparison to see how our most expensive build compares to “economically responsible” boxes.

Once again, the performance advantage of popular freeware becomes clear, as 7-Zip allows us to “zip” files almost as fast as we can “rar” them. This is a new test for a program we’ve rarely used before, but comparisons with other products should prove interesting.

Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.